After garnering mostly rave reviews in London’s West End and Stratford-upon-Avon, “Kyoto” by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson is currently running Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater. The play spans 1989-1997 and is narrated from the point of view of Don Pearlman (Stephen Kunken), an American oil lobbyist who works to sabotage UN climate negotiations. It’s framed as his retrospective narration, with his wife Shirley (Natalie Gold) as a secondary character observing his moral decline. Despite its urgent subject matter, the production fails to deliver on its promise. ‘Kyoto’ is an overstuffed and overlong political thriller whose impact is undercut by a sentimental ending.

To be clear, there’s much to admire here. Stephen Kunken, reprising his Olivier-nominated performance from the UK productions, delivers a tour-de-force as Pearlman—charming, ruthless, self-justifying, and increasingly desperate as the world he’s fighting to preserve slips away. Directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin stage the action with impressive fluidity, moving seamlessly between conference halls, hotel rooms, and temples, while Miriam Buether’s minimal set and Akhila Krishnan’s video projections (featuring archival footage and live text) immerse audiences in the bureaucratic machinery of climate diplomacy. Natalie Gold brings affecting weariness to Shirley, a woman watching her husband corrode from the inside. Peter Bradbury brings dark comic energy as Fred Singer, the cynical atmospheric physicist whose snarky asides (“Communists and homosexuals mostly…”) provide mordant humor amid the procedural density. The ambition is undeniable: Murphy and Robertson want to dramatize nothing less than how the modern world failed to act on its greatest crisis. But ambition and execution are not the same thing.

The problem is one of sheer information overload. The play demands audiences track five major conferences across eight years (Geneva, Sundsvaal, Chantilly, Berlin, Rio, Kyoto), dozens of country delegations and their shifting alliances (JUSSCANNZ, G77+China, AOSIS, OPEC), technical climate science (fingerprinting, CO2 stabilization, computer models), and Byzantine UN procedural rules (brackets, consensus mechanisms, bloc systems, voting protocols). Characters drop acronyms like breadcrumbs—IPCC, COP, GCC—while explaining the difference between “real” emission cuts versus “American” cuts, the nuances of “Pledge and Review” versus binding targets, and why the year 1990 matters as a baseline. Kunken’s direct-address narration helps guide audiences through Act One’s thicket of procedural maneuvering, but by Act Two the play abandons that lifeline. When Raul Estrada (Jorge Bosch) explains “unanimity” versus “consensus” in overlapping conference scenes, the play feels less like political thriller and more like graduate seminar—didactic, preachy, and dramatically inert. The substance may be important, but the delivery drowns audiences in procedural detail.

The play’s length problem is most acute in Act Two’s notorious punctuation sequence. When the UN interpreters’ contracts expire at midnight during the final Kyoto session, delegates spend what feels like an eternity debating a single paragraph in multiple untranslated languages, shouting “COMMA!” “DOPPELPUNKT!” “TUUA AIKAI!” “Ju hao!” “Period!” back and forth across the conference hall. What begins as clever satire—showing how the fate of the planet hinges on the placement of a semicolon—quickly devolves into theatrical gimmickry. The joke lands in the first minute, but the sequence stretches on interminably, testing audience patience rather than illuminating political dysfunction. By the time Chairman Estrada finally gavels through the remaining articles in a rapid-fire montage, the play has been running nearly three hours. Murphy and Robertson seem uncertain whether they’re writing a taut political thriller or an exhaustive documentary. The result splits the difference and satisfies neither impulse.

But the play’s most significant failure is its sentimental ending, which undercuts what should be its most devastating moment. In Act Two’s Kiyomizu Temple scene, a journalist reveals to Shirley that the Seven Sisters—the world’s largest oil companies—have known about climate change since 1959. “All the discoveries our scientists are making today, the Seven Sisters got there decades ago. 1959! Before we’d even reached the moon. By the 70s, they’d correctly predicted temperature rises to the exact degree. And in 1979 they were presented with plans to prevent it all. Which they then buried.” This is the play’s moral reckoning, the moment that should land with fury: institutional evil, premeditated deception, decades of knowing the cost and choosing to profit anyway. But instead of ending with this indictment, Murphy and Robertson give us Shirley’s maudlin epilogue—a monologue about loving someone you disagree with, cherry blossoms falling earlier each year, and how “for a moment, the whole world, we did agree.” What began as political thriller dissolves into therapeutic platitudes. The play wants to indict the systems that buried the truth, but it can’t resist softening the blow with personal sentiment and false hope.

Climate change demands urgent, clear-eyed theater that names culprits and costs without flinching. “Kyoto” aspires to that clarity but loses itself in procedural weeds and tonal confusion. Kunken’s performance deserves a tighter, sharper play—one that trusts audiences to grasp complex politics without drowning them in acronyms, that knows when a theatrical gimmick has run its course, and that possesses the courage to end with moral clarity rather than sentimental compromise. The story of how the world failed to act on climate change in the 1990s matters profoundly, especially now. But Murphy and Robertson’s execution—overstuffed, overlong, and ultimately unwilling to fully indict the systems it exposes—fails to match the urgency of its subject. What should be a searing political thriller becomes an exhausting civics lesson with a Hallmark ending.